The Sydney Housing Demonstrator Data Hub

This project is part of the Australian Urban Research Information Network (AURIN), a Commonwealth-funded program initiated in 2010. The Hub will provide an initial test bed for the development of an integrated spatially referenced database of key housing data drawn from a variety of sources. The central aim is to build a fully spatially co-referenced set of interlinked data based on the property record of all residential properties in the Sydney Metropolitan area. Over its one year life, the project will demonstrate how a variety of spatially referenced data can be built up that will facilitate a range of innovative analyses that have never been achieved to date. It will provide a blueprint for the extension of the model to other Australian urban contexts.

The Hub will provide a central point of contact to AURIN for NSW housing data. The intention is to produce a generic data hub that can be used by other researchers – possibly in the form of a reusable NeCTAR image. The project will provide an administrative interface on this hub to allow the management of data sets published from the node, including addition and removal of datasets and support for security permissions for datasets programmatically. Ideally these features would be available directly to the owners of the data.

The Hub will develop a database system, maintained by City Futures, that combines online, offline and value-added (including ‘toolbox’) datasets. External access to this system would be provided through AURIN, with technical arrangements being undertaken by Intersect Ltd. Data for the Hub will be sourced through two key partners, the NSW Department of Planning and Infrastructure and Australian Property Monitors.

The base of the project will be the land use cadastre which will be linked via the General National Address File so that individual property level data can be spatially referenced to each other. On this will be built a series of interlinked datasets that will allow address level data to be interlinked for further statistical manipulation and aggregation using data drawn from a range of administrative sources and to integrate these with data from other sources, such as Commonwealth Departments, that are available at higher scales of spatial resolution such as census tracts or post codes. The dataset will use the ABS Census geographies as the basic spatial organising framework for aggregating the datasets from basic Census Mesh Block scale.

The project will illustrate the potential of these integrated geospatial datasets through a series of tools and analyses that will use these various datasets in creative ways that will enhance our ability to understand urban housing markets. The output will have the potential to link with data from other AURIN lenses that are similarly geo-referenced, such as energy and health records or transport datasets.